Sønderborg, Denmark – Denmark boasts forward-thinking top-down and bottom-up energy policies. At the national level, a political consensus unimaginable in the United States yielded, this March, an energy plan that commits the country to ditch fossil fuels by 2050.
At the local level, as in the United States, some of the most aggressive initiatives to cut carbon have been launched by cities. The clean energy transition under way on the island of Samsø, the subject of a 2008 feature by The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert, is the case study best known outside of Denmark. But there are many other examples. The island of Ærø, for instance, is home to the world’s largest solar heating plants.
On a recent reporting trip to Denmark organized by the State of Green consortium, I visited another, Project Zero, which is based in Sønderborg, a municipality of 77,000 located near the border with Germany.
The comprehensive plan being implemented in Sønderborg follows what can be thought of as the Danish model: energy efficiency coupled with a complementary mix of clean electricity and fuels harvested from local resources. The Project Zero goal is to reduce carbon emissions in the Sønderborg area by 25% from 2007 levels by 2015, and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2029.
“Project Zero is actually a vision,” says Christian Eriksen, Project Director, Project Zero A/S, the private firm charged with implementing the plan. “It’s a vision of a CO2-neutral Sønderborg area, no later than 2029. Not done by cutting the main breaker and killing the power, but based on sustainable growth and creating bright green jobs.”
“To do this,” he adds, “we’ve adopted a holistic approach that’s bottom-up. It’s not just top-down, about planning and coming up with business and new technology to drive this forward. It’s also very much about participation, about learning, and empowerment of our citizens and local companies.”
The backbone: an integrated district heating network
The most important near-term goal of the ZEROCarbon Roadmap is to, by 2015, build a transmission pipe to connect the area’s islanded district heating networks. Planners also want to expand the networks. Today, just 34% of the area’s buildings are connected to district heating. By 2015, one-half of the buildings in urban areas that currently burn oil or gas for space heating are expected to switch to district heating.
With the transmission backbone in place, the integrated district heating network will draw heat from multiple complementary renewable sources: geothermal, household waste, biogas, biomass, and solar.
“This means that the multiple sources that we have, our waste incineration facility, our geothermal facility, our straw- and wood chip-burning boilers, our solar heating facilities can be used to their maximum efficiency, and with the result being the cheapest price for our customers,” explains Eriksen.
On a tour of the Sønderborg region, we visited several of the area’s energy facilities. A biogas plant attached to the area’s wastewater treatment facility generates a half-million kilowatt-hours (kWh) annually. The waste-to-energy facility is a combined heat and power (CHP) plant that operates at more than 90% efficiency. The plant, which also burns biomass, produces ash clean enough to be used as fertilizer, Eriksen says.
We also visited a solar heating plant in the village of Vollerup. There, 6,000 m2 of solar collectors (see picture at right) heat water to 130°C from early March until late November. In the United States, solar waters heaters generally sit atop individual homes and businesses, and the hot water is seldom used for space heating. At Vollerup, the hot water is instead fed into the local district heating system and a 4,000 m3 storage tank.
Additional pieces of the clean energy infrastructure have recently been added or are planned. A 29-megawatt (MW) geothermal plant opened in Sønderborg last year. Two CHP biogas plants, scheduled to come online in 2013 and 2015, will process manure from the area’s plentiful pig farms.
An offshore wind park with a capacity of 120 MW is planned for shallow waters 6 to 10 kilometers from the coast. Local residents could buy shares in the wind projects (see my recent post on Denmark’s new “Buy Legal System” community wind rules).
“We want to do this based on the area’s renewable resources,” says Eriksen. “In our mind, it’s not very sustainable to ferry wood chips all the way from Canada or from Africa to here to be CO2 neutral.”
Energy efficiency and community engagement
The Project Zero roadmap envisions that energy-efficient technologies and community engagement will reduce energy consumption by 38% by 2029. Much of the avoided energy consumption will come from the switch to carbon-neutral district heating (rural households will switch from oil, natural gas, and electric heating to heat pumps and biomass burners).
Eriksen emphasizes the importance of mobilizing consumers to make energy efficiency a way of life. “The most important thing we can do is to get citizen participation,” he says. Nearly 45% of the region’s carbon emissions come from heating and lighting, appliances, and electronics.
To engage households in the effort to slash energy use, Project Zero launched a pilot, ZEROFamily, which reached 115 families and 500 participants. At the end of a yearlong education and outreach campaign, participating households reduced energy consumption by an average of 25% and water use by an average of 45%.
The age of the local building stock represents a challenge, as well as an opportunity, to achieving the energy efficiency goals. The average age of homes in the area is 65 years, Eriksen says, well before Denmark’s first building energy efficiency standards appeared. “The majority of our houses here have a very low energy rating, meaning the E, F, and G range,” he says.
Project Zero employs a field energy adviser, Charlie, charged with visiting homes and producing a free energy report for the occupants. Charlie has already visited 700 Sønderborg-area homes. “It turns out that 65% of the people visited by Charlie go on to contact a craftsman or architects and actually get something done,” says Eriksen. “His visits, over the last year and a half, have generated more than 10 million euros of business for our carpenters.” The retrofit projects have created more than 300 local jobs.
Note: This is the third in a series of posts on clean energy and climate solutions in Denmark. Other installments looked at Denmark’s new community wind shareholder plan, seawater-based district cooling in Copenhagen, Copenhagen's success as a cleantech leader, and what other cities can learn from Copenhagen's climate adaptation plan. The reporting for this post was made possible by financial support from State of Green, the official green brand for Denmark, and a public-private partnership founded by the Danish Government and industry.
